CAREER: Asymmetries in Infant Processing of Faces-Origins and Implications

幼儿似乎并不认为人脸是特别的;例如，他们同样能很好地识别直立和倒置的面孔，以及人类和猴子的面孔。然而，一岁以后，婴儿对直立的人脸的识别要比对倒立的人脸或猴子的脸好得多。据推测，这与婴儿在第一年对直立的人脸有更多的经验有关。另一个不对称的经验是，婴儿通常看到更多的女性比男性的面孔;平均而言，70%的婴儿的互动在第一年是与女性。这种经验的不对称性应该会影响婴儿如何感知面孔，识别面孔，了解女性和男性，以及扫描面孔。尽管对婴儿面孔加工的研究已经有40多年的历史，但婴儿对女性和男性面孔加工的可能差异却很少受到关注。同样，大多数研究都使用白人女性的面孔作为刺激，因此，显著的不对称性会引起对婴儿面孔感知的普遍性的警告。在美国国家科学基金会（National Science Foundation）的职业奖（CAREER award）的资助下，Rennels博士将探索婴儿在对人类面孔产生特殊敏感性时所经历的变化的本质。在一系列实验中，Rennels博士将研究诸如婴儿如何在不同年龄代表面孔，如何增加与男性面孔的经验会影响其他男性面孔的识别，婴儿的面孔-声音关系知识是否女性比男性更好，婴儿是否表达女性面孔相对于男性面孔的视觉偏好，以及婴儿是否比不喜欢的面孔更熟练地浏览喜欢的面孔。这些研究还将研究婴儿是否更有可能在熟悉的环境中表现出对女性面孔的偏好和更熟练的扫描（例如，当面部来自熟悉的种族群体时）比不熟悉的上下文（例如，当面孔来自不同种族群体时）。这些研究将拓宽对婴儿如何处理熟悉或不熟悉种族成员面孔的理解。除了这些研究目标外，该项目还包括开发一门课程，让学生提出和实施以社区为基础的项目，通过应用心理学研究促进社会正义。学生将了解心理学研究如何用于服务社区。课程项目产生的积极成果应该广泛影响学生和社区。

Young infants do not appear to perceive human faces as being special; for example, they recognize upright and inverted faces equally well, and human and monkey faces equally well. After the first year, however, infants recognize upright human faces much better than inverted faces, or the faces of monkeys. Presumably, this is related to the fact that during the first year infants have much more experience with upright human faces. Another asymmetry in experience is that infants typically see more female than male faces; on average, 70% of infants' interactions during the first year are with females. This asymmetry in experience should affect how infants perceive faces, recognize faces, learn about females and males, and scan faces. Despite a span of over 40 years of research in infant face processing, possible differences in infants' processing of female and male faces has received very little attention. Similarly, most studies have used the faces of Caucasian females as stimuli, so significant asymmetries would raise caveats regarding the generality of what is known about infant face perception.With funding by a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation, Dr. Rennels will explore the nature of the changes that infants undergo as they develop special sensitivity to human faces. In a series of experiments, Dr. Rennels will examine such questions as how infants represent faces at various ages, how increased experience with male faces affects recognition of other male faces, whether infants' knowledge of face-voice relations is better for females than it is for males, whether infants express visual preferences for female faces relative to male faces, and whether infants more expertly scan preferred faces than they do non-preferred faces. These studies will also examine whether infants are more likely to demonstrate preferences for and more expertly scan female faces in familiar contexts (e.g., when the faces are from a familiar racial group) than unfamiliar contexts (e.g., when the faces are from different racial groups). These studies will broaden understanding of how infants process faces of members of familiar or unfamiliar races. In addition to these research goals, the project includes development of a course in which students propose and implement community-based projects that promote social justice through application of psychological research. Students will gain an understanding of how psychology research can be used to serve the community. Positive outcomes resulting from the course projects should broadly impact the students and community.